


Carpe Noctem

by sistermagpie



Category: Dead Poets Society (1989)
Genre: Gen, Mild Language, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:12:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sistermagpie/pseuds/sistermagpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a night in November the powerful play goes on and seven Dead Poets contribute a verse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carpe Noctem

**Author's Note:**

  * For [antarctic (ohargos)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohargos/gifts).



**Todd Anderson**  
 _My tongue could not speak what stirred within me_  


“Jeffrey Anderson,” Neil sighed, pulling his striped tie out from under his collar and dropping it on the bed. “You realize that for a humble Welton boy like myself that’s like having dinner with the pope.”  


“My brother’s no pope,” Todd muttered.  


“Dinner with a movie star, then. Marilyn Monroe. You dangled the possibility before my eyes and then took it away. How do you expect me to get over that?”  


Todd chucked a towel at Neil’s head. “You don’t want to come anyway. You’re going out with your theater friends.”  


A skinny freshman had appeared in the doorway. “Somebody here for Todd Anderson?” the boy squeaked.  


Neil leapt off the bed. “He’s here! He’s here! Jeffrey Anderson in person!”  


Todd walked out, shutting the door behind him. He could still hear Neil laughing all the way down the hall.  


He found his brother in the foyer chatting with Dr. Hager. Jeffrey appeared to have become even heartier since Todd saw him last, if such a thing were possible. That was at the beach house, Labor Day weekend. The temperature had since dropped 35 degrees but Jeffrey was bright as ever, as if he carried the sun from that burning day inside him. _Maybe he ate it,_ Todd thought.  


“Todd!” Jeffrey shouted, seeing him hesitating on the stairs. “Get down here, kid!”  


Dr. Hagen stood aside, beaming, while Jeffrey embraced his brother, mashing Todd’s face into his warm, wide sweater chest. Jeff smelled of aftershave and wood smoke with a hint of bourbon, like Dad. “How’s he doing, Doctor?”  


“Todd’s settling in well,” said Hagen.  


“Don’t let him fool you. He’s a hellraiser!”  


“Hmmm,” Hagen said ominously.  


Jeffrey gave Todd a final squeeze and released him, gasping and red. By the time he’d caught his breath Jeffrey was telling Hagen about Princeton. “The Ivy Club is my first choice for now, but the bicker’s not for three months so I could change my mind. Honestly, I just look forward to meeting all the fellows.”  


“We’re glad to have you representing Welton,” Hagen said.  


Todd blinked down at the rug. This evening would be easier if Neil was there, but Jeffrey, for some reason, had insisted that Todd come alone. The bonds of brotherhood needed to be forged in isolation, he said. That must be something they taught at Princeton.  


“I’ll do my best sir,” said Jeffrey. He threw an arm around Todd. “After I show my little brother a night on the town. Just the two of us.”  


They left the dorm side by side, like the best of chums, Jeff’s arm still slung over his shoulder. Todd turned around once to look up at his window where Neil was grinning and pretending to swoon at the sight of Jeff Anderson in person. _He’s not usually like this,_ Todd wanted to yell up to him. _We’re not friends._ But Jeffrey had already swung him back around towards the waiting car.

* * *

**Richard Cameron**  
 _Look out for the birds of the air,  
Look out for the beasts of the field --_  


Richard Cameron hadn’t asked for a guy like Charlie Dalton for a roommate. Mr. and Mrs. Dalton probably hadn’t asked for a guy like Charlie for a son. They all of them got screwed by the luck of the draw. But the Daltons didn’t have to worry about getting demerits for it.  


“Why do you care so much what I do?” Charlie asked him. He was stretched out on the bed in his underwear, as usual. Like living with a goddamn pin-up. Only this pin-up could talk.  


“Look, maybe you don’t care about your future,” said Cameron. “But some of us have plans. Some of us care about this school. Some of us care about this country. Some of us…”  


“You’re cute when you’re ambitious.”  


“Jackass.”  


Cameron kicked open the door and headed to the bathroom.  


The trouble with Welton was that Nolan didn’t know what was going on in his own damn school. Not in the classroom—he might as well spend an hour with Fibber McGee for all the stuff Keating said that would help him on an English exam. Carpe diem. That wasn’t even _in_ English.  


Not in the dorms—Pittsie and Meeks might be building an atom bomb in there for all Nolan knew. Cameron wouldn’t be surprised.  


And not out in the woods. Cameron still had his misgivings about this Dead Poets Club. He was glad they hadn’t been caught, but why hadn’t they been caught? It made Nolan look like a sucker. Each time they got away with a midnight run to the cave it taught guys like Charlie Dalton that they could get away with it. The Charlie Daltons of the world got away with everything, Cameron thought as he pushed open the door to the washroom. Right under the headmaster’s nose. If he was headmaster…  


The two guys in the john broke apart when he walked in. What were they whispering about, Cameron wanted to know. He knew the look of a guilty person, and these two were plenty guilty. Bonnie and Clyde guilty. Leopold and Loeb guilty. Rosenberg guilty.  
But guilty of what?  


“’Scuse me, gentlemen,” Cameron said, moving smoothly to the sink. “Don’t let me interrupt.”  


“You’re not,” one of them said. Sutton was his name. Cameron made it his business to know all the guys on the hall. His curly haired friend was named Glick. He said the name was German. Cameron wasn’t so sure.  


Sutton gave his hands a quick rinse and high-tailed it out of the john. Glick followed quickly after.  


Everybody was up to something in this school, Cameron thought. He intended to do something about it.  


* * *

**Steven Meeks and Gerard Pitts**  
 _When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room_  


From the roof of Stark Hall, the world was nothing but sky. Gerard Pitts lay on his back and gazed up at the stars. Meeks climbed down from the tower like a man debarking from a rocket.  


“Try it now.”  


Pitts was reluctant to turn from dark black space back to the dark green of Vermont, but they were up here for a reason. Meeks was determined to get a stronger signal for the radio. He’d been fiddling with the antennae and swore he could reach Boston or even Philly. Before he came to Welton Pitts had never been farther than Burlington.  


He rolled over and flipped the switch. The radio came alive with the familiar explosion of whistles and static. “Come in, Captain Video, come in. Do you read me?” Pitts said.  


Meeks’s smaller, paler fingers took over manipulating the dial. The static resolved into silence, then a human voice. “…big sounds coming. Next up it’s The Fleetwoods…”  


“That’s WCFR,” Meeks said. “Let’s keep going.”  


They plunged into more static, then silence, then a blast of Dean Martin, then silence again and then…  


“What is that?”  


They leaned in close over the speaker. Pitts reached for the earphones but stopped, unsure. “Is that some kind of…signal?”  


Three high-pitched beeps, followed by a low chirp. It reminded Pitts of the signals from Sputnik, which he had followed with excitement and dread.  


“We must be picking up something military,” Meeks said. He was trying to sound knowledgeable but Pitts could tell he was just as baffled, especially when the beeps were followed some low, distant chatter. It was buzzing and metallic, almost robotic.  


“Somebody’s talking.”  


“Several people.”  


“It’s voices.”  


“It’s not English.”  


They stared at each other over the tangled wires.  


It didn’t sound earthly.

* * *

**Knox Overstreet**  
 _Mothers of America  
_

  
_let your kids go to the movies!_   


  


Knox Overstreet would have loved to have been on the roof that night. Or out at dinner with Todd. But he’d promised himself he’d spend the evening in the library catching up on the trigonometry he’d been putting off all month. Meeks had offered to help him, but it wasn’t a tutor he needed. It was Chris.  


The library chair groaned as he leaned back and scrubbed his hands over his face. How was he supposed to concentrate on numbers when Chris’s face kept floating up before him? He might as well be in the movie theater back at home. He didn’t mention it to the guys, but he and his mom had gone to a lot of matinees over the summer. The Bijoux was showing a lot of her old favorites and the air was cooler there than at home. Knox saw _The Man in Grey_ , _All That Heaven Allows_ , _To Each His Own._  


But that was summer and this was fall and he had a quiz on Monday so he stared down at his books. Chris was probably going to a party tonight. With Chet. Maybe she was wearing that pale pink sweater she had on when Knox first saw her. (“Mrs. Danburry?” he’d asked her. She must have thought he was an idiot!) He could see her now as clearly as if she was projected on the Bijoux screen, sitting at a mirror in a bedroom full of frilly lamps, frilly curtains and frilly pillows. And some pictures of movie stars on the wall, like Gidget.  


“Chet’s going to love you in that dress,” he imagined Chris’s mother saying. Her mother was played by Lana Turner in the movie in his head. “Just love you.”  


“But Mother, I don’t care what Chet thinks about my dress or my hair or my eyes or any of it. I don’t love him!”  


“Don’t be such a child,” Lana said, suddenly cold as ice. “He’s a handsome boy. Strong. From a good family. He lettered in football!” She stalked up behind Chris in the mirror, her eyes fairly sparkling with greed and desperation. “You know how much your father needs the money. He lost everything when his partner embezzled those funds. This is our chance to get back on our feet!”  


“But Chet Danburry!” Chris cried. “He’s such a jerk!”  


For a second Knox thought her mother might slap her, but even in his fantasies he couldn’t do that to Chris. So instead her mother merely took her by the shoulders and ordered her to take off the dress so it didn’t get wrinkled before the party tomorrow. Then she stalked out of the room, her high heels clicking on the floor.  


Chris—now changed into her pink sweater and tight little pants—waited until she heard her mother go downstairs and then, choking down a sob, she climbed out the window into the waiting arms of…  


Knox himself. Well, not exactly himself. If he’d taken the time to really examine this Knox he might have noticed his hair had a bit of a Troy Donahue swoop he could never manage in real life. He might have recognized a bit of a swagger copied from Charlie, a dashing grace that belonged to Neil. He was even a little taller, as if he’d borrowed a few inches off Pitts.  


“Chris!”  


She threw her arms around his shoulders and he spun her around and kissed her  


“Oh Knox, I can’t stand it!” she said, clinging hard to his baggy sweater—there would be no school uniforms in this movie if Knox could help it. “My family wants me to marry Chet and I just can’t do it.”  


Knox pressed her hands in his. “You don’t have to,” he promised. “Meet me here tomorrow and I’ll take you away. I’ll take you somewhere Chet can never find you.”  


“Oh, Knox!” Chris sighed. She kissed him again. The trigonometry textbook lay forgotten on the desk.

* * *

**Charlie Dalton**  
 _I SING the Body electric_  


Charlie Dalton always loved buses, probably because his mother never let him ride one. Out the back windows of the Dalton’s numerous cars he watched the things go by, like barges on wheels, and envied all those inside them. Tonight he was riding a bus out of Welton.  


It was a trial run, maybe, for the day Charlie finally went on the road for real, rambling to California or Alaska or Mexico. Tonight he was just going north on Route 100.  


Once Cameron had stomped out of the room with smoke coming out of his ears Charlie had pulled on some clothes and strolled out into the cold to the bus stop on Silver Lake. He got on behind two cafeteria ladies from the public school and took a seat behind a couple of mechanics.  


“You see that Caddy that came in today?” one said.  


“You see the Nosebleed who was driving it?”  


“That was a crime. How does a goof like that get the money for that kind of car? I wanted to toss him into the trunk.”  


“And you know he’s going to be driving around some doll who wouldn’t even look at him if he didn’t have those wheels.”  


The first man laughed. “Look who’s talking. You meeting Debbie tonight?”  


The other man checked his watch. “She’s waiting for me at the bar right now.”  


“Lucky bastard.”  


Charlie was nearly hanging over the seat listening. It wasn’t just the things the men were saying. It was the way they said it. A certain timbre of the voice that spoke of someone who’d seen things, done things, felt things. A voice that was alive. Charlie’s own voice, to his own ears, sounded like it might as well be coming from the transistor radio he used to have tied to the handlebars of his bike: small, tinny and artificial.  


He was halfway off the bus before he consciously realized he was following the two men out onto the street and into the dive bar on the corner where liquor and Debbie and life were waiting.

* * *

**Neil Perry**  
 _Smart lad, to slip betimes away_  


While Charlie Dalton was busing his way north on route 100, Neil Perry was driving south in a green 1946 Sedan with a bunch of people from the Midsummer cast and crew. There was Jennifer, who played a fairy in Neil's first scene, Andy and Elliot who played Demetrius and Lysander respectively, Sally the wardrobe mistress and Sally’s friend Lucille, chief of the stage crew, behind the wheel. The Sedan was her car; the night was her idea. An old friend of hers—very old; Lucille said he was like a father to her and she had grey hair herself—was directing a play outside Ludlow and they all wanted to see it.  


Not everyone was invited to the play. Neil was secretly as proud of being included in Lucille’s invitation as he was of getting into the play at all. Lucille had only invited people she thought were serious about acting—Neil, Jennifer, Eliot--and Judy, who hadn’t come because she had to go to dinner at her grandmother’s that night. Andy was only there because you couldn’t invite Eliot to something without Andy.  


“What’s the play about, again?” Andy asked.  


“It doesn’t have a plot, exactly,” Lucille explained. “The characters are meeting in limbo. They don’t have pasts or presents or futures. It’s experimental.”  


“How do you play a character with no past?” Neil asked.  


Lucille glanced at him in the rearview mirror. Neil could tell it reflected well on him that he’d asked. “The actors worked with the director to build the character’s behavior out of nothing,” she said. “Clive loves collaborating with actors. You’ll be lucky to work with a director like Clive even once in your career.”  


The implied assumption that Neil would have a career where he might work with a director more than once was like a gift Lucille had given him without realizing it. Neil looked at the road stretching out before them and wondered why he had ever worried about the future. The road ahead was straight and clear now. Neil Perry knew where he was going.

* * *

**Richard Cameron**  
 _They'll tell you how and where  
The other side's concealed._  


As Cameron suspected, Sutton and Glick weren’t going their separate ways. Their meeting in the bathroom was no coincidence because ten minutes after Cameron scared them away they’d regrouped at the front door of the dorm.  


They didn’t know Cameron was following at a distance. He was too far away to hear what they were saying, but he could see they were up to something. They walked side by side, closer than two guys with nothing to hide. Their heads were bent together, they whispered back and forth. God, did nobody notice these things but Cameron?  


They disappeared through the heavy oak doors of the library. Cameron waited a second before following them inside.  


But when he finally pushed open the heavy doors they were nowhere to be seen. ”Dammit!” he said. It was as if they knew Cameron was onto them. Well, it wasn’t going to be that easy to get away.

* * *

**Knox Overstreet**  
 _It’s true that fresh air is good for the body_  


_but what about the soul_

  
_that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images_  


It was the gardener who betrayed them. He saw Chris sneaking out the back door with her suitcase and alerted her parents. Chris had long suspected the man of being in love with her mother so he couldn’t be trusted. Chris was locked in her room with threats of Catholic boarding school (Knox imagined a drafty stone convent with bars on the windows and medieval torture devices in the basement) and no idea what to do. Her mother couldn’t force her to marry Chet Danburry—this was 1959, not 1659. But she could keep her from having any fun, keep telling her how important it was to her father and their family until she gave in.  


“Oh Knox, save me!” Chris whispered and just like that the window slid open and Knox appeared. “I knew you’d come,” Chris murmured as he took her in his arms.  


“I’m taking you away from here,” he promised. “Come on, our ride’s outside.”  


Knox led Chris to a dazzling red Chevy. He was going to drive them to Boston or New York—maybe someplace out west. Someplace no one knew them. Someplace they could be anyone they wanted.

* * *

**Charlie Dalton**  
 _The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;_  


The key to belonging somewhere was believing that you belonged there. This philosophy had gotten Charlie Dalton into parties, backstage at theaters, and once into an orthodox synagogue. This was his first attempt at trying it out in a dive bar. “Johnnie Walker on the rocks,” he said, hitting the perfect combination of bored and cocky.  


“Nice try, kid,” said the bartender. “You get on home now. Your mother would probably kill me if I gave you a sip of beer.”  


“My mother loves liquor,” Charlie said—truthfully. “And my father admires my daring. You’d impress them both by giving me a drink.”  


The bartender looked at him steadily. “Out.”  


“Now let’s talk about this,” Charlie said. “I come to your bar on a cold winter’s night, there won’t be another bus for hours, possibly. Would a responsible adult really throw me out in the street?”  


The bartender pointed at the door.  


Charlie got off the stool, but only to more dramatically gesture. “You’re a businessman! How can you support an arbitrary age limit on enjoying your product? Is it not a man’s right to have a drink at the end of a long day? Are we not men? Debbie, don’t you agree?”  


Debbie, who had turned out to be a cute red-head in a tight dress, giggled.  


“I say we declare this bar a sanctuary for free men—and women. Free men who will not be bound by society’s laws! Free men who lift their glasses together and toast to good fellowship! Carpe diem!” He grabbed the nearest drink and downed it in one gulp, hoping no one could see his eyes water.  


“Hey!” yelled the guy whose drink it was.  


“Sorry, man. Looks like I owe you one.” He looked back at the bartender. “You wouldn’t keep me from buying a drink for my friend wouldja?”  


The bartender threw down his towel and looked ready—eager, even—to do just that, until a smoky, leathery but oddly titillating woman with a cigarette stopped him. She was old enough to be Charlie’s mother. Maybe that’s why she hated to see him thrown out in the cold.  


“Let the kid stay, Hank,” she said. “And pour another rye for Ed before he gets mad and breaks another table.” She swiveled in her bar stool to face Charlie, inhaled on the cigarette, and released a stream of smoke into the air. “I like boys with guts,” she said. “What’s your name?”  


Charlie was tempted to tell her Nuwanda, but only briefly. “It’s Charles,” he said offering her a fresh cigarette. “Charles “Guts” Dalton. Can I buy you a drink?”

* * *

**Neil Perry**  
 _From fields where glory does not stay_  


Neil liked “Take Cover” more than he understood it. He liked being invited to the converted barn where the cast and crew hung out even more. At the rare adult dinners Neil was invited to at home his parents’ friends usually asked Neil a few perfunctory questions about school and then politely ignored him. Lucille’s friends treated him like he belonged at the table, asking his opinions about the play and even asking him how Midsummer rehearsals were going.  


“I played Puck once in an open-air theater outside Springfield,” said Leonard, one of the two best actors in the show, in Neil’s opinion. “On opening night a raccoon wandered onstage and started following me around. It was totally humiliating—and he came back every night. He learned the blocking so well I would up following him around. We discussed setting traps but dammit he sold tickets.”  


Neil searched his brain for something witty to say about playing Puck himself, but he was distracted by Clive, the director, sitting down at the table. Clive was like a director from an old black and white movie: a thin, precisely dressed Englishman in a pale suit. He brought with him a bottle of some fancy liqueur that Lucille refused to let him share with the high school students. Neil didn’t really care. Just being there was buzz enough for him.  


Clive took a seat at the head of the table and started sharing anecdotes of his own about the theater he’d done back in England, and all the Nazis he’d played in Hollywood movies when he went to California after the war. It was in the middle of one such anecdote that he suddenly stopped and stared right at Neil.  


“Clive?” said Leonard. “Is something wrong?”  


The old man blinked his eyes as if trying to clear them. Neil could see what looked like tears shining in them even in the dim light.  


“Clive?” Lucille repeated. “This is Neil Perry. He’s playing Puck in the Midsummer production. I told you about him.”  


Neil smiled. He often smiled around his father, a nervous tick he couldn’t always control, the facial equivalent of flinching before a blow. But Neil didn’t feel scared under Clive’s scrutiny. The old man looked so vulnerable, suddenly, almost lost and too, well, old to be threatening. He blinked at Neil for a second more, and then shook his head. “So sorry, Mr. Perry,” he said. He’d addressed Neil by name, but seemed to be thinking of someone else, someone so far away neither Neil nor Clive could see him. “You look exactly like someone I used to know years ago. It was in the war—the Great War. I’d never…it’s just uncanny, the resemblance. Someone I never thought I would see again. And you’re an actor, Mr. Perry?”  


Neil hesitated, half-expecting his father to appear out of nowhere to answer for him, before he remembered his father didn’t even know he was there.  


“Yes,” he said. “I’m an actor.”

* * *

**Todd Anderson**  
 _And the village thought me a fool._  


Jeffrey brought Todd to a colonial-style inn with lots of wood and pewter in the dining room. They were seated beside a giant fireplace, which Todd found suffocating. He drank a lot of ice water and wished he was at the Dead Poets cave.  


“You know, last week at Princeton I could swear I saw Aggie the Ogre?” Todd said.  


“The Welton cook? What would she be doing at Princeton?”  


“I think I was hallucinating.”  


“Maybe you were secretly craving her Salisbury steak…”  


It was strange talking to Jeffrey this way, as if they had something in common. Before, when Todd was at Balincrest, he’d felt like he and Jeffrey lived on different planets. They had their parents in common, but Todd seemed to know a different Donald and Barbara Anderson than the ones Jeffrey talked about. Jeffrey’s Andersons were amusing and upright, just a little bit square. Todd’s were unpredictable and cold and constantly disappointed. But Hellton was Hellton, no matter who you were.  


“Hey, how’s old Portius?” Jeff said, sawing into his meat. “The trick with him is to get him talking about Voltaire. Bring him up in your essays if you can. Even a small reference to French cheese can set him off.”  


“Oh, he’s not there anymore,” Todd said, apologetically. “He retired. Professor Keating has English now.”  


“I think Portius started teaching at Welton the day it opened,” Jeffrey said, as if he hadn’t heard. He was frowning around the room as if he was looking for someone to whom he could complain about something. Todd didn’t know what.  


“The new teacher—Mr. Keating. He’s different.”  


“Remember that time Coop was hungover in class?” Jeffrey went on. “And Portius made him read from the Four Quartets until he threw up?”  


“I think that was before I was there,” said Todd.  


“I know that. But you must have heard about it. Everybody knew Coop.”  


“I don’t know many guys,” Todd mumbled.  


“Poor Old Portius,” said Jeffrey. “Coop drove him nuts. When it was his turn to recite before the class he came dressed in character for his poem. _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_. The dress was his mother’s but I still don’t know where he got the wig. Portius almost had a heart attack. Gave him a month detention. Could I get another bourbon, please?”  


Todd hadn’t noticed the waiter approach. “Mr. Keating says men always played the girl parts in Shakespeare’s day,” he said.  


Jeffrey wasn’t listening. He frowned into the fire, glowing in the flames. “A dying ember” was the phrase that came to Todd’s mind, but that was the last phrase anyone would ever use to describe his brother.  


“I’m in a club,” Todd blurted out. “Unofficially. I mean, the club is unofficial. It’s called the Dead…”  


“Here you are, sir.” The waiter glided up and set a glass in front of Jeffrey.  


“Thanks.” He sipped the bourbon and shrugged. “I don’t know why I drink this stuff,” he said at the same time Todd said,  


“Mr. Keating says…”  


“Who?” said Jeffrey. His eyes darted to the fire and back. “What were you saying?”  


Todd realized, belatedly as usual, that whatever Jeffrey had come here tonight for, it was not to hear how Todd was getting on at Welton.  


“Nothing,” he said. “You were telling me about Professor Portius.”  


“Portius, right,” Jeffrey said. “Like I told you. Voltaire. Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.”  


“Carpe diem,” said Todd, but Jeffrey didn’t seem to be listening.

* * *

**Steven Meeks and Gerard Pitts**  
 _How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;_  


“It wasn’t Martians,” Meeks said finally. They’d been discussing the strange voices on the radio for some time but so far neither of them had said the name out loud: Mars. Or Jupiter. Or Venus. Or any planet other than earth.  


“Of course not,” Pitts said. They sat back to back beside a chimney, staring at the stars. “Martians don’t exist.”  


Pitts scanned the sky left to right, right to left, just in case. “But do you ever wonder if there’s anyone out there?”  


“We’re just one small galaxy in endless space,” said Meeks. “It would be almost arrogant to think we’re all there is. Right?”  


“Very arrogant,” Pitts agreed. “And if they’re out there it’s only a matter of time before they find us or we find them.”  


“Not much time at all,” said Meeks. “With recent advancements in satellite technology we could bump into someone sooner than we think. It’s good to be prepared.”  


“What would you say to them?” asked Pitts. “Imagine you’re the first person on earth to ever talk to a spaceman. What would you say?”  


Meeks looked at the radio, now lying silent on the rooftop. He loved being called on in class, but only when he was confident he knew the answer in advance. “What would you say?” he asked.  


Pitts jumped up and addressed the sky. “All the past we leave behind, We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O pioneers!”  


He sat back down.  


“They ought to have more poets working at NASA,” Meeks said.  


Pitts agreed wholeheartedly.

* * *

**Knox Overstreet**  
 _they may even be grateful to you_  


_for their first sexual experience_

  


The wind ruffled through Knox’s hair as they sped down the highway and the stars seemed to rush by his head the way they had in the planetarium show he had seen in fourth grade. He didn’t even know which highway he was on. Route 66, he supposed. They were in the desert where no one could find them, and Chris was as close as she could be in the front seat, her head resting on his shoulder.  


“Get to the sex!” Charlie would say at this point, but Knox preferred to take his time. Love wasn’t just about that. If he and Chris were soulmates--which Knox was pretty sure they were because why else would he have been so utterly thunderstruck from the second me saw her?—they had an understanding that went beyond sex. They ought to be talking to each other on a profound level.  


“Chris,” he said, passionately. “Don’t let’s ask for the moon when we have the stars.”  


Shit. That was the girl’s line. Bette Davis in that movie where she starts out with one eyebrow and then goes blind. No. Wait, that was two movies. Maybe Chris would know which ones. But he couldn’t ask Chris. That wasn’t the type of thing you were supposed to say to a girl as you were driving down Route 66.  


The trouble was he had no idea what to talk to Chris about. Did she like Bette Davis? Did she like movies? Did she like Coke or Pepsi-Cola? What did she want him to say?  


“What’s the formula to find the cosine of a triangle?” he said finally.  


“Opposite over hypotenuse,” sighed Chris and nestled deeper into his baggy sweater.  


At least he was doing a little studying.

* * *

**Richard Cameron**  
 _When the blackbird bolts from the copse,  
Or the cattle are staring about,_  


Cameron found Sutton and Glick in the 700s row. They didn’t see Cameron at first, and he took those few seconds to get a good look at them. Sutton was obviously the weaker of the two. Maybe he was having second thoughts about whatever they were up to together, because Glick looked to have him pinned up against the Architecture section. Of course as soon as Glick saw Cameron he stepped back like nothing at all was happening, and picked up one of the books he’d left lying on the table. Sutton pulled down the sweater Glick had held bunched up in his hand. His face was flushed.  


“What’s going on, fellas?” Cameron asked, leaning against the shelf. “Looks like you and I are studying the same subjects.”  


Sutton looked for a second like he wanted to confess, but Glick just muttered, “Don’t think so.”  


Cameron smiled in a friendly way, to show them he wasn’t going anywhere. He was gratified to see Glick looking frustrated, like he wanted to tell Cameron to get lost but didn’t want to risk getting in trouble.  


It was Sutton who saved them. The quiet ones were always cunning. Sutton looked around nervously at the shelves like he was seeing them for the first time. “Hey, Dan, look at this. This isn’t the Science section at all. No wonder we couldn’t find anything on minerals.”  


“Oh yeah,” said Glick, catching on to Sutton’s game. “We don’t belong here. You’re right.”  


The two of them ducked out of the aisle so fast they forgot one of the books they’d left on the table.  


“Yeah, right,” said Cameron when they were gone. As if he’d believe a crazy story like that—them not knowing the difference between Architecture and Mineralogy. Did they think Cameron didn’t know the Dewey Decimal System? He knew it very well.  


He swiped the abandoned book off the table and read the title: _Death in Venice_ , by Thomas Mann.  


Well, that proved it. _Jesus Christ,_ Cameron thought. He couldn’t believe it. Right here at Welton Prepatory School. 

Dear God. 

Communists.

* * *

**Charlie Dalton**  
 _They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,_  


“The kid’s all right!” Ed declared, downing his second rye of the night courtesy of Charlie Dalton. Nobody could say exactly how many he’d had before that. “To Charlie!”  


“To Charlie!” Ed’s buddies repeated.  


Charlie generously accepted the toast. He’d just about run through all his cash but it was worth it.  


“Charlie here is the future of this country,” Ed announced, throwing an arm over his shoulder. “It’s young men like him that are going to lead this country into the future.”  


“Hear hear!” answered the other men at Ed’s table. They were joined by Debbie and the two mechanics and Arlene at the bar.  


“Why can’t all boys your age be like you, Charlie?” Ed said.  


Charlie shrugged. “They’re not all so bad. You should meet some of my friends. You’d like them too.”  


“My boy’s at the high school and he’s a goddamned mess,” said one of Ed’s friends. “Him and all those hoods he goes around with. They call themselves the Emperors but what they really are are a bunch of goddamned idiots. You don’t know them, do you, Charlie? The Emperors?”  


Charlie didn’t but he could easily picture them. Duck-tail haircuts and filthy jeans and not one of them ever knowing the touch of a woman. “Can’t say I’ve met them,” he said easily. “I don’t know many guys from the public school. They don’t give us much time off.”  


“Time off from where?” asked Debbie.  


“Welton Academy.”  


It wasn’t Charlie who’d answered. He and the rest of the bar turned around to the corner from which the voice came. A middle-aged man in a fisherman’s cap sat at the end of the bar glaring at Charlie like he wished he could blow him up where he sat. “He’s one of those little shits from the private school.”  


“Earl…” Arlene warned.  


“His daddy buys him anything he wants! Thinks he can have everything. Any girl he wants.”  


Charlie couldn’t stop himself from shooting a quick, longing look in Debbie’s direction. He would have kept looking at her if Earl hadn’t gotten up so suddenly from the bar that he knocked over his stool. Charlie jumped out of his own seat and took a step backwards. Earl was coming at him. He was slightly unsteady on his feet, but his eyes never left Charlie’s.  


“Look at him. He’s probably never worked a day in his life. Never will work a day in his life.”  


“Leave him alone, Earl,” said Arlene.  


“Sir. Earl,” said Charlie. The rye and the beer and whatever that other drink he’d had suddenly seemed to be rolling around in his stomach, threatening to tip him over from the inside. “Whatever bad experiences you’ve had with Welton, allow me to apologize.”  


Earl was practically nose to nose with him now. Or he would have been if he wasn’t half a head taller than Charlie, putting them nose to collar bone. “Geraldine Schumer,” Earl pronounced.  


Charlie knew he was being accused of something and he had a pretty good idea what. “Friend of yours?”  


“She was my girl. But that son of a bitch wouldn’t leave her alone. Earl Piekowsky wasn’t good enough for her then. No, sir. She needed a Welton man. A guy in a sissy uniform with money.”  


“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. He looked hopefully at his buddy Ed, but neither Ed, nor Arlene nor the mechanics, nor Debbie seemed to find this scene as alarming as Charlie did. The liquor in his stomach threatened to boil over again and Charlie wondered if that might not be a good thing. If he threw up in the guy’s shoes, it might provide a good distraction so he could run. “Obviously this Geraldine girl didn’t have very good taste in men,” he said.  


“She deserved the best!” Earl bellowed. He poked a finger hard into Charlie’s chest. “You aren’t fit to shine her shoes!”  


Charlie took another step back. “I’m sure I’m not. A lovely girl, Geraldine. That guy wasn’t good enough for her.”  


“Damn right,” said Earl. For a horrible moment Charlie thought the man might start crying. “I loved her, you know. You sons of bitches up at Welton just have to have it all.”  


“That’s enough, Earl,” Arlene said. “It’s been twenty years. Three kids and two husbands ago for Geraldine. Charlie here wasn’t even in diapers when she left you for that guy. She probably doesn’t even remember his name.”  


“Brandon Meeks,” Earl muttered.  


Charlie made a mental note to ask his own Meeks if his grandfather ever picked up a girl named Geraldine. “You won’t believe me, Earl, but I know how you feel. Welton guys lose girls to the public school all the time! I’ll bet that girl—Geraldine—she probably still regrets going out with that Meeks guy.”  


“You bet she did!” said Earl. “The guy was a pinhead.”  


“Her loss!” said Charlie.  


“Damn right! She deserved what she got!”  


“Deserved it all!” Charlie hollered.  


“Good riddance to her! She’s nothing special!”  


“Nothing at all!”  


“Two-timing snob!” Earl said.  


“Stuck up bitch!”  


The moment the words left his mouth—or a split second before—Charlie knew he had made a big mistake. He blamed it on the whisky. He blamed it on the smoke in the air. He blamed it on his nerves. But there was no chance to take it back before Earl’s fist was hurtling at his face.  


Charlie had been in fights growing up at summer camp and on the soccer field. But being punched full-out by a drunk adult man whose high school sweetheart he’d insulted was a very different experience. It knocked him clean off his feet and onto the sticky floor. The voices above sounded suddenly far away, as if they were coming from the other end of a long tunnel with a siren ringing in the distance. The spit in his mouth had gone all metallic. He touched his hand to his face and it came away bloody. Charlie was confused, then surprised, and then possessed of a wild, primitive joy he could never have described.  


The next moment seemed to happen in slow motion. Charlie rose up off the floor as if emerging from some primordial ooze, barbarically yawping as he did. Earl looked at him in shock. Ed made some ineffectual gesture to stop it. Arlene shook her head and laughed. And Charlie Dalton’s fist connected to the stubbly cheek of an old drunk named Earl.  


It was glorious.

* * *

**Neil Perry**  
 _And early though the laurel grows_  


“…Lancashire Fusiliers together. Kenneth had been at Oxford too, Magdalene College. We had both read English, but that wasn’t why we hit it off right away. I can’t say what the reason for that was, but I was supremely grateful for it. Old Ken. When I first met him his hair was dark like yours, Neil, until he shaved it. We all did, for the nits. I think that’s why I didn’t see the resemblance right away. Not until you…I can’t quite explain it, but you had a look in your eye, a Puck-ish quality, if you’ll excuse the pun. Ken had it too. It almost makes me wonder about reincarnation.”  


Neil had moved to sit next to Clive. The table had a hushed quality now, since Clive had begun speaking about his war. Neil had a feeling he’d never spoken of it before.  


“Was he an actor too?” asked Neil.  


“He…he could have been,” said Clive. “There was one afternoon, you see. We’d just spent hours pumping out the trench and gone back to the dugout. Ken was writing a letter home. I had a book of poetry I liked to read. I’d memorized most of my favorites by now, and so had Ken, he’d heard them so much. I started reading, ‘The sea is calm tonight, the tide is full, the moon lies fair…’ On this day, for some reason, Ken began reciting with me. I had never heard him read poetry before and he was…well, even then I knew that I would never be the actor I dreamed of being.”  


“Nonsense,” said Lucille with a sniff. “I’ve seen you perform, Clive.”  


Clive waved her away. “Oh, I’m competent, all right. I can analyze a text and communicate its meaning. But I lack the ability to give the words wings, my dear. That’s what I heard Ken do in the dugout that night. He died a few days later, you know, on night patrol. Poor old Ken.”  


Clive lapsed into a thoughtful silence no one else wanted to break.  


It was Neil who finally spoke. He said, “I know that poem.”

* * *

**Steven Meeks and Gerard Pitts**  
 _Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,  
In the mystical moist night-air,_  


“What do you think the old sailors would think about space travel?” Pitts asked. His backside had gone numb on the cold roof and his nose was running but he still didn’t want to leave. If the Martians called back he didn’t want to miss it.  


“All those years they used the stars to navigate,” said Meeks. “They never imagined man could sail right through them.”  


“Of course they did,” said Pitts.  


Pitts was rarely sure of an answer, but when he was Meeks knew better than to argue. “That’s Andromeda,” he said, pointing to the north east. “Named by the astronomer Ptolemy in the second century. He named her after a princess. She was eaten by a dragon.”  


Pitts made a grunt of disapproval and shifted from one cheek to the other. “It wasn’t a dragon. It was a sea monster. And she didn’t get eaten because Perseus rescued her. He snuck up on the sea monster while he was invisible and killed it. Then he married Andromeda. After turning the guy she was supposed to marry into stone.”  


“How did he do that?”  


“Head of Medusa.”  


“How did he make himself invisible?”  


“Helmet of Hades.”  


“Gerard, you have hidden depths,” Meeks said.  


Pitts shrugged. “Well,” he said. “I can’t say it in Latin.”

* * *

**Todd Anderson**  
 _Yet at the start there was a clear vision_  


“October twenty-fourth?” Todd said. “I was at Welton that weekend. You didn’t come up.”  


Jeffrey shifted uneasily in his chair. Obviously Todd was failing to get whatever he was trying to say.  


“I know I wasn’t at Welton that weekend, but I was thinking about it, right? I was going to call you, see how you were doing. Dad said I should. We could have gone to dinner somewhere.”  


“Like we are now?” said Todd.  


“Right. But on October twenty-fourth.”  


Jeffrey was leaning over the table, over the glass of watery bourbon and melted ice. His face, up close, looked like the face of some desperate stranger. It had been years since Todd had held the focus of Jeffrey’s full attention. It was hard not to just agree to anything his older brother said. If Jeffrey wanted Todd to say they were together that Saturday in October, why shouldn’t Todd do it? Jeffrey must have good reason for asking him. It showed great trust in Todd that Jeffrey came to him for help.  


But another part of Todd recoiled from the puffy, flushed face across the table and suspected that what Jeffrey trusted wasn’t Todd’s character, but Todd’s lack of same. “But why?” he said “Are you in trouble? What happened? You can tell Mom and Dad. They’re always on your side…”  


“I can’t tell anybody,” Jeffrey snapped. “I can’t tell anybody, and you can’t tell anybody. I mean it, Todd.”  


“Tell anybody what? Who’s going to ask me?”  


“Nothing,” said Jeffrey. “It’s a lie anyway. There’s this girl in New Jersey, but she’s lying. She says….forget it. You don’t have to know. Just do what I’m saying. October twenty-fourth. I was at Welton. We had dinner here. We ordered exactly what we’re having now. If anybody asks you, that’s what happened.”  


“But I don’t…It just seems like…” Todd’s careful arguments dissolved into a familiar mush. _Like tigers into butter,_ he uselessly thought. “Like a lie.”  


Jeffrey waived his objections away, then turned the gesture into a request for the check. Both the waiter and Todd had no choice to obey.

* * *

**Knox Overstreet**  
 _which only cost you a quarter_  


_and didn’t upset the peaceful home_

They stopped at a little lodge for dinner—it reminded Knox of Rock Hudson’s place in _All That Heaven Allows_. Only instead of Rock Hudson running the place it was Mr. Keating in a plaid shirt. Knox wasn’t sure why he’d stuck Mr. Keating in this movie. Maybe he just wanted to show off for him with Chris.  


From the look of things they had been traveling for a few days. The Chris in his mind had a hint of danger in her eyes now, like Bonnie Parker, and he could only assume Knox in the movie would have a similar spark, being Clyde.  


Mr. Keating listened to their story with admiration. “The main thing to remember,” he said, “is that nobody defines you but yourself. It doesn’t matter who your parents are, how much money you have, where you go to school. You can’t rely on any one else to give your life meaning. You have to find that meaning in yourself.”  


It wasn’t as eloquent as the speeches Mr. Keating gave in class, but Knox didn’t have the knack for that kind of dialogue. Whatever the words, they made Knox feel reckless and invincible. He was right to dream of running away with Chris. He deserved the best kind of life he could live—and so did she, right? He glanced over at her in the booth beside him. Chris was glowing with excitement, all thanks to Knox.  


She looked back at him, more beautiful than he’d ever seen her, and she said, “I’m going to move to San Francisco and become an artist!”  


“What?” Knox said these words actually aloud, in the corner of the library. His fantasies had gotten away from him before, but never in this direction. Chris wanted to be an artist? Did she even know how to draw? And what was Knox supposed to do? This was supposed to be his fantasy and he hadn’t even got to the sex yet.  


Chris squeezed his arm as she struggled to explain it. “All my life I’ve had to choose between which boy my parents wanted me to marry. I’m not going to marry anyone—for now.”  


Knox looked to Mr. Keating for some help, but he was somehow pulling out a map and looking up the quickest routes to San Francisco.  
“I’ll never forget you for rescuing me, Knox,” Chris said, and her mouth was as pink and soft as it was that first night when she opened the Danburry’s door. “But I know you didn’t rescue me just for yourself.”  


She kissed him once more, then melted away like a puff of smoke and Knox was left alone in the library with a pile of trigonometry books vowing to never include Mr. Keating in one of his daydreams again.

* * *

**Neil Perry**  
 _It withers quicker than the rose._  


Over and over, since he decided to audition for a play, Neil had imagined himself on stage, a captivated audience hanging on his every word. He never imagined that the stage would be in a converted barn in rural Vermont, or that the audience would be little more than a dozen actors and crew members of a local theater group. But as he recited his lines he knew that this was what his life was meant to be.  


Lucille, Sally, Jennifer, Eliot, even Andy were enthralled. But Neil spoke only to Clive.  


“Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” he said. “for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”  


Mr. Keating hadn’t taught this poem. Neil had discovered it one rainy Sunday flipping through his textbook for Dead Poets material. In the end he hadn’t brought it to a meeting either. More than once he’d wondered why he’d memorized it. Now he knew.  


“And we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.”  


For a long time no one said a word. They didn’t even applaud. The whole barn seemed to have gone quiet, as peaceful as the empty fields around them, full of trees. When Clive spoke his voice was just as peaceful.  


“Thank you.”

* * *

**Richard Cameron**  
 _The wise commander stops  
And All Patrols look out!_  


Mr. Nolan pinched the bridge of his nose, as he seemed to do every time Cameron had something important to tell him. “Communists?” he sighed.  


“I was shocked too, sir,” said Cameron. “But you well know that academia is a breeding ground for them.  


“You think these boys are some sort of Soviet agents?”  


“Of course not!” said Cameron. This was why the man had a school running out of control. A student tried to be responsible and keep an eye on things and he treated that student like a child telling him there were Martians among us. “I know Sutton and Glick, sir, and they don’t exactly have a lot of influence at the school, at least not among the more prominent students. But it’s the misfits that get drawn to these radical ideas, sir. If Glick and Sutton are turning into Bolsheviks you can be sure they’ll be trying to convert others to the cause and who knows where that could lead? I don’t think other students should be exposed to it, that’s all. Do you want me to talk to them?”  


“That’s quite all right, Mr. Cameron. I’ll speak to Glick and Sutton. Is there anything else?”  


Cameron’s chest swelled just a bit under his uniform. “No sir. Just thought you ought to know.” He frowned suddenly, noticing for the first time that the headmaster was wearing a bathrobe. “Not feeling well sir?”  


“I was about to take a bath,” Nolan said evenly.  


“Well, I’ll leave you to that. Enjoy yourself, sir,” said Cameron. He hadn’t quite gotten the words out when Nolan closed the door.  


Cameron pulled up his collar for the walk back across the quad to the dorms. He felt much better than he had when he went out that evening. Perhaps there was some justice at this school. Some order.  


Perhaps this world had a place for men like Richard Cameron.

* * *

**Charlie Dalton**  
 _And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul._  


The bus let Charlie off on Silver Lake in front of the five and ten. It felt very late, though the clock had just struck midnight. Welton wasn’t much for nightlife, so the streets were nearly deserted. Charlie’s footsteps bounced from the sidewalk to the buildings and back in that way they did on very cold nights.  


He felt relatively clear-headed and had a vague memory of throwing up at some point. He also remembered Ed buying him a drink, Arlene hanging his tie above the bar as a trophy and the feel of Debbie’s healing lips and fingers on his cheekbone. When he breathed in the icy air his nose ached—and probably would continue to ache for the next few days thanks to Geraldine Schumer and the Meeks family charm.  


He turned the corner onto the road leading up to the academy and caught sight of himself under the streetlamp reflected in the windows of a dress shop. He stared. His swollen nose looked almost normal next to the black eye. He had no way of explaining either to his teachers. Sleepwalking maybe or a fall down the stairs.  


He stepped closer to the window to assess the damage. He looked different than he had when he went out this evening. It wasn’t just the swelling. This was the face of a man things happened to, the face of a man who wasn’t afraid to take a risk.  


Charlie snorted at his own reflection. “The face of a kid who opened his big mouth and got his ass kicked by a drunk,” he told himself.  


But as he made his way up the hill to the academy, whistling, Charlie Dalton had never felt more triumphant or alive. And some residents of Welton that night were startled out of sleep by the barbaric yawp that echoed down Silver Lake Street in the dark.

* * *

**Steven Meeks and Gerard Pitts**  
 _and from time to time,  
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars._  


Meeks laid his glasses gently on the table by the bed and turned off the light. He stared up into the darkness and listened to the wind rattling the windows.  


“Tell me the truth,” asked the disembodied voice that was Pitts. “Did you think it could have been Martians?”  


“Yes, I did,” said Meeks.  


There were some things you could only admit to your best friend in the dark.

* * *

**Todd Anderson**  
 _A high and urgent purpose in my soul_  


Jeffrey didn’t wait until Todd went into the dorm before turning around to drive back out the gate. Todd found he didn’t much want to go inside. Jeffrey had left him so confused he wasn’t sure he could even find his own room. He sat out on the stoop with his butt turning to ice and his eyes watering in the wind, trying to make sense of what he had done.  


What Jeffrey had done Todd didn’t really want to know. If Todd played his part well—and Jeffrey assured him it was unlikely he would even be questioned about That Night—he wouldn’t ever have to know. Technically Todd hadn’t done anything wrong, but he felt like he had. He almost wanted to write a poem about it. The poems they read in class and in the Dead Poets were all about being noble and heroic and brave, but Mr. Keating assured them poems could be about anything. Even whatever Todd was feeling right now.  


He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there when he heard his name come, warmly, out of the dark. “Todd?”  


There was the light crunch of frost on grass and then there was Neil, materializing out of nothing as if Todd had wished him into being. “Hi.”  


“Why are you sitting out here in the dark?”  


Todd looked around, as if the answer might be written somewhere, and Neil laughed. It was a real laugh, not the strangled chuckle Neil often gave when he didn’t know what else to do. The laugh that made Todd’s problems seem totally solvable if they just put their heads together.  


“I was waiting for you,” Todd said. “Where the hell have you been?”  


Neil grabbed a handful of Todd’s coat and hauled him to his feet. “In limbo. In a trench. In an old barn. You wouldn’t understand me if I told you.”  


“But you’re going to tell me,” said Todd, pushing open the door to the dorm.  


“Of course I am. What’s the point otherwise?’  


He slung an arm around Todd’s shoulder and together they went back to their room to get some sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Todd Anderson  
> "Frank Drummer," _Spoon River Anthology_ by Edgar Lee Masters
> 
> Richard Cameron  
> "A Boy Scouts' Patrol Song" by Rudyard Kipling
> 
> Steven Meeks and Gerard Pitts  
> "When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer" by Walt Whitman  
> "O Pioneers!" by Walt Whitman
> 
> Knox Overstreet  
> "Ave Maria" by Frank O'Hara
> 
> Charlie Dalton  
> "I Sing The Body Electric" by Walt Whitman
> 
> Neil Perry  
> "To An Athlete Dying Young" by A.E. Housman  
> "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold


End file.
